You can't, because in fact your brain really creates images.
Healthy person most commonly sees images based on the light their eyes receive, but based on the quality of information you may interpret it wrongly. Especially light captured by side sight -- here brain draws a big part of picture itself.
People with schozophrenia can see and hear non-existing people like we see real people. It can take them a lot of reasoning to verify if person they are seeing in fact real.
That boils down to maps. With a few helper functions it's not a big deal. I can't remember when I needed to unmarshal JSON into map last time, tho.
I've already made this choice. Switched from C++ to Go, and now I never want to touch another language at all. Since I'm not writing kernels or embedded, Go is pretty fast for everything else. Not very popular in gamedev, but that's just a lack of 3rd party libs, specifically native graphics support.
As for other languages, I can't justify unnecessary complexity that is generally welcome by those language communities. Go is straight simple yet powerful, and I admire that.
I've noticed significant performance degradation in World of Warcraft and League of Legends. Used Lutrix to start them. FPS in those games visually dropped to 3-5. While on Windows there was smooth 60+ frames. I've tried that about 3 or 4 years ago.
I'm using Linux for work. At home, I have Windows on my desktop, I mainly use it to play games.
One day I've tried to move to Linux for my home system, but it came out that games work slower because of DirectX adaptation layer. And most of the games can only work with DX.
Martha Is Dead is a grim psychological triller about twin sisters, set in Italy at the end of WW2. It's not about war, however. This game left me with deep emotions no other game could do. Heed the warnings given by authors, though. It may come too disturbing to some people.